A stroke of luck

March 18, 1999

Last Sunday evening, by a stroke of luck, I was privileged to watch the movie "Schindler's List" for a second time. It was shown on NBC and to that network's credit there were few commercial interruptions. Forty-five minute stretches of pure content were the norm. I believe the final segment extended uninterrupted for well over an hour. It is the kind of movie that at it's end you don't move. You sit and stare at the screen as the credits scroll by, still in its wind. It's been said you have to see it twice.

The unrelenting Nazi extermination of Jews was a foundation of daily life no less than war, food, drink and music. The ashes of incinerated bodies dusted cars, hats and buildings. Bloodlust raged at every level of the elite Nazi corps running ghetto compounds on German turf and in one of them a life-loving German promoter lusted after profits derived from slavery.

An initial reluctant act to save a couple of Jews birthed for Schindler a consuming, heroic and tragically sane endeavor. Newly sensititized to the reality of the holocaust he sank his fortune into buying the lives of nearly a thousand Jews. Facing arrest at war's end as war criminal and profiteer, Schindler was stunned not by his fate but rather the perception that with earlier recognition and a greater effort he might have saved a few more lives.

Each life unspeakably precious, each an inseparable thread in the tapestry of his own.

Many more people should see this movie. Twice. The work of a master, it represents a benchmark in the evolution of our species and a navigational aid for our future. Even markers through the rear-view beat driving blind and we clearly have a long way to go.

Yesterday forty Albanians were lined up, kneeling in the dirt, compliant and still, and were riddled by a thousand bullets. Bloodlust is licensed in the name of some tortured political, cultural or religious cause promoted by a handful of malignant men. It's a frequent ritual in Kosovo and in parts of Africa and other places yet today, nearly sixty years after the big war and the Hitler Hell.

I say NATO negotiators should have Serb leaders join them for a showing of Schindler's List before grouping back to the table or, as the case may be, leaving it. At least we'd know they'd looked at a mirror and, dare I hope, noted the utter irrelevency of the Nazi memory today except as a horror show, a nightmare, a still diseased corpse, a black hole in our time, and, yes, a marker in the road from which we should have long departed.

ADDENDUM
June 28, 2008
I discovered this site many years later and from it took the following:

These are but a few of the 100,000,000 Christians exterminated by Anti-Christian Jewish Red Commissars in Russia under the orders of Trotsky, the Jewish Commissar of Commissars. Yet Spielberg will never Direct a "Schindler's List" Movie for them or their genocide. Why is that? Because Jews did it.

My relatives and my fellow Christians were murdered in the USSR under Jewish Marxism between 1917-1945, and many of the Marxists came to Russia from New York to do this to Christians in 1917 after Jacob Schiff, the Jewish anti-Christian maniac banker who owned The Guaranty National Trust, the largest bank in the United States, financed Lenin and Trotsky $35 million for the Red Revolution and the mass killing of these Christian souls. We must never forget this.

--- James Stenzel

On China

August 10, 1999

I've read countless articles on China, and scanned countless more. Over the past few months my concern over China's somewhat aggressive and unforgiving behavior has reached a point where I'm becoming quite attentive. Very recently I've pointedly researched news articles and studies world wide in order to either confirm or refute my growing belief that China has actually declared war on us or is in the process of doing so. I've found nothing to refute this possibility, rather much to confirm it.


Perhaps the question is: Is China simply, at long last, stepping into the vacuum created by the Soviet Union's default at playing the world's opposing super-power, or does the ruling elite of China have a more ambitious agenda?


Without doubt there's a massive hole where the USSR used to stand and we do understand that for China's current leadership to remain in power there must be a national agenda, one easily defined and clearly political.


If you take a good look at where China stands today - militarily, economically and geopolitically - in context of, and in contrast to, her status (and how she was perceived) only a generation ago - you too might conclude that her leadership has zip to lose and everything to gain by boldly taking us on.


It appears that they've done so and are by the day moving to advantage their position.


Finally, though, exactly why? Do China's leaders simply want for China her due as the world's leading population center and hottest and most promising economy, or are they looking for real estate?


I believe they are looking for their due. They've never made a serious move to export the communist ideology - that was Russia's thing. They are picking up real estate (Hong Kong, Taiwan) methodically, acquiring real assets rather than mere land.


I believe the Chinese leadership wants China to be recognized as one of the world's great powers and respected as the one nation who's maintained that status for most of the past 5,000 years. I believe this leadership wants us to butt out of it's unique internal political structure which, for the most part, has also worked for 5,000 years.


I believe that their agenda is to get themselves into a position where they don't have to take any shit from anybody. The stuff that goes on internally is their affair. There've been some political turnovers in the past and might well be some in the future. Compared to the stuff which has rocked the rest of the world over the last couple thousand years theirs is self-contained and spare. No one has reached out from China to ask anyone at any time to make their internal deals.


I believe the Chinese have major respect coming to them. Not only for the past, but for what they're doing right now. Perhaps this is all they want.


I'd certainly like to think so.

On children and guns

August 26, 1999

"K" posted a query/comment filled to the brim with one of the most haunting issues of our age. I first read it late in the evening before I attended a birthday party for my own much loved, now four year old, grandson. I considered it too important to answer under pressure from the alarm clock, and decided to save it till now. I didn't sleep well that night. This issue was with me all night and when I showed at the party I must have looked like a man lost in the woods for a month.

Let me start with this: I'm 55 and have sons, daughters and grand-kids. I'm a good shot, experienced, and capable with either pistol or rifle over almost any range.

I've shot exactly one living thing in my life. I was 11 and shot a bird on a power line with my new BB gun. The bird struggled to fly away, finally dropping within my view. It struggled to breath for a while, fluttering its wings. The bird was the first and last living thing I ever aimed at.

I can't wait to tell this story to my grandson, as I have to my sons. The memory has stayed with me in order to be told.

To shoot a living being for sport is not good -- for me. This is not to say it isn't good, just that it isn't good for me. Those I love should understand every side of this.

I've never hunted but have fished many, many times for food -- starting as a boy. In Florida I'd bring home dinner for 3 or 4 two or three times a week. The fish had exactly the same trauma and will to live as the bird but I was looking for food and was willing to kill. Today there are countless fishermen who fish for sport. They'll unhook the fish, gently, and ease it back into the water. I can't do that. Why should the fish have this nightmare?

Hunting "game" animals for sport has its place in today's over-populated world. Humans procreate damn near as fast as bugs or rabbits. Wild animals lose their homesteads by the day and are shot as a means to preempt the slower death ... starvation. In this sense sports hunting has its dark place.

Though I never have, I would hunt - and kill - for food, if required. I'd personally skin and cut the animal whose life I had taken. I would eat or use every molecule of the precious life I was destined/enabled to absorb. He or she would be my friend. We will have lived and served, with honor, the great unrelenting stream.

Before the invasion American Indians lived as a part of the dying process -- and paid homage to their fellow creatures as they were absorbed.

Having said all that I am not prepared to cast a final stone in regard to what about our sons right now. I would take the words above to make sure the kid gets the full picture. But I would submit the following as well.

There is a social aspect.

When my oldest son, now near 16, was 10 I bought him a BB gun, BBS, and a target. I taught him hour after hour the safe way to handle a rifle (and later - a pistol, also BB.) I mean it was drilled. I also taught him how to aim, and reach the "bulls-eye". We shot only the targets, and no other use was permitted, or even considered seriously. I told him the bird story and more.

I did all this because I knew that sooner or later he'd run into a situation where he'd be introduced to a gun and be expected to handle it. I did not want him to have a short hand in a fast game, or to be forced outside. He was a willing, but not easy, student. For some reason getting his eyes to focus correctly was problematic and was never resolved completely. But he did learn, absolutely learn, the tenets of safety and principal.

A few years later he was a guest at his older sister's home and was invited by her husband to go hunting. They lived at a place where hunting and eating game animals was a part of a day's work. From a tree my son - having been unceremoniously handed the rifle as only an in-law can do - shot dead a duck from 150 feet with one shot from a .22. To this day my daughter's husband, dumbstruck then, says that's the finest shot he's ever seen.

Jerry, my son-in-law, retrieved and saved the duck thinking I'd want to stuff it for my son's trophy shelf. No. Though I didn't respond in such a way as to criticize Jerry's thinking, I never really responded. Months later he threw the body away, wasted entirely.

But I would not have denied my son the supreme feeling he gained by rising to that occasion, rather unexpectedly too.

I've taken cruises on ships in the past and one of the funnest things to do on an otherwise uneventful, perhaps boring day is to shoot "skeet" off the stern. At the very rear end of the boat there's a sling that propels clay disks into the retreating wind and folks aim shotguns and try to blow them apart. Yes, perhaps there's a leftover here from war days or from the days of Theodore Roosevelt (whose happiest ambition was to shoot game animals) but it is now a social thing. I'd want my son, and my grandson, to be able to participate without embarrassment.

Mostly, I want my sons and grandsons to confidently participate in all the events thrown at them, knowing full well that they can, while knowing also that some of them are very poorly grounded, and why.

The larger issue is about the gun. The gun exists.

From cowboy days boys have been fascinated by guns. At 9 I found a blank gun hidden deeply within my mother's private space. Nine year old boys can find anything. Later, she explained that a yo-yo had given it to her at a party where he had pulled it out and shot it, deafening everyone, and especially her. She was highly pissed and the man, the yo-yo, gave it to her in retribution. At 9 I showed it to all my friends and a few parents. No, I wasn't arrested but calls to my mother were made.

That same year I decided I was part Indian, if not entirely, and said so to whoever would listen. I also found (again -- looking deep) some of my long lost father's Air Force things and wore them around the neighborhood. Boys for sure explore, and some girls do too. My point is that I want a kid to explore with as full a deck as can be provided.

The kid will be provided the challenge. The idea is to prepare the kid.

Yes, Batman. Not only my favorite hero long ago, but still today. I liked (like) Superman, too. Clean as a pin. Nice guy. No guns. Plastic Man, Spider-man, Mighty Mouse, Wonder Woman, and countless others - no guns.

Not one of them uses a gun.

K's theory on guns ("when they are mature enough to know what guns do ...") and "-- to each his own --" is almost sound. But it is not sound. "They" are going to be exposed. Someone is going to hand them a gun someday, or try to. At that moment in time your kid needs to know the truth and exactly how to handle it.

The idea is to prepare the kid. Your way.

Yes, it is a "necessary item for them to get acquainted with" -- so that the idea of using it in a negative way is not an option.

As a boy I was privileged to have been taught by the NRA - National Rifle Association - how to shoot, and how to respect the rifle/gun in my hands. This was a long time ago when they were into teaching, not lobbying. I was aggressive and looked them up, then joined. I bicycled to the range twice a week.

At 12-13 I became an expert shot and an avowed safety aficionado. I was on their junior rifle team. They provided the single shot .22 rifles and all equipment. I was enabled to, later, be a member of the Georgia Military Academy Rifle Team (11th grade) and, later, in the Army ... well, the experience served me well.

Now I have a grandson, newly four, who needs to know as much as he can know. He has a good mind and soul, and needs to be able to walk in today's world with a full deck, confidently, and in as full possession of truth as is possible.

My youngest son has a close friend whose mother will not allow him to ride a bicycle. She is afraid for what might happen to him. He is 10 years old now and has never ridden a bicycle. He doesn't know what it is good for, or bad for. When I take my son there occasionally, to spend a half day or so, I caution him not to mention the bicycle thing (my kid is an avid and capable rider who knows how to be safe) but am I doing the right thing? Perhaps I should insist on teaching her kid how to ride safely. Perhaps I should seriously insist, and even supply the bike. Maybe it would open a new dimension for the boy, or save him from untold embarrassment or worse, later.

My theory, I suppose, is that those under my tutelage should know the "availables" as soon as they are capable of absorbing them, along with my view of what makes them relevant, manageable, and meaningful. I'd prefer that a kid didn't have to walk into a wall face-up, or a pit.

In any case, I can tell my bird story well enough to break a kid's heart and, without another word or action, inform the kid about ... guns ... and life and death.

My theory on guns is not "to each his own". It is to teach the full story. This applies to every other "weapon" as well -- bow and arrow, blow gun, sling shot, fist, words .. you name it.

As I run off at the mouth here, I must say that some of the Oriental disciplines -- Karate, for example -- teach cleanly that an ability to hurt is no justification for doing so.

Reading over K's own words, though: "Or is it, with this day and age, a necessary item for them to get acquainted with for when they mature?"

Yes. And not only for this day and age. For all days and ages before us. It has always been necessary.

And the time, gently, is now.

As an aside, I've been preparing a hiking stick for my grandson. Well into it, I realized the wood I was working on was imperfect, not safe or durable. It is a boy I am talking about. When he goes to hike, and needs a stick to cross a treacherous stream, I want him to have, first time out, something he can lean on against the slope. I'm making another for him and it is filled - stiff, flexible, durable - with all that I know.

Another day, another challenge.

The fully developed leader

November 17, 2000

A couple things.

Watching Gore make his proposal yesterday afternoon (EST) I was reminded of my 5th grade teacher. She was as phony as a three dollar bill in that she had no real, fully developed character. She was around 40 years old and her persona was stillborn. She was a nun. I was the only non-catholic in the class, and one of a very few in the school.

She was also an asshole. I called her bluff one day. I told her to go to hell. She called me up to the front of the class and slapped me hard. I told her to go to hell again. I was sent to the principal who calmed everything down (until my mother got involved). It all ended, not well, but it ended.

My 4th grade teacher was also a nun at the same school. Sister Anthony Marie (vs: Sister Regis). She was about 28 and was the first fully grown woman I ever fell in love with.

Gore may not be an asshole but his presentation yesterday created an image of a man whose intellect is not directly connected to his message or to his target. He was a marionet pulling his own strings. The connection to the nun is that he also was not real.

Bush, Jr. presented his response in a drastically different way. I watched carefully as he strode up to the podium and began to speak. I was with him. He seemed clean in that he intended to connect with the viewer with what he was thinking rather than what he felt we needed to hear.

Alas, he was reading a speech written for him. About 1/3 to 1/2 of the way through I found it impossible to focus on his words and was instead distracted by his struggle to deliver them. I failed to hear at least the last half of his response to Gore and was, finally, embarrassed for him.

But he was much closer to Sister Anthony Marie than to Sister Regis.

Neither of these men should have a mandate of any kind.

We'll have to wait a while for another leader who deserves, or commands, a mandate.

Let's see if we agree on these guys: [1] F.D. Roosevelt, the recipient of three mandates in a row [2] Dwight Eisenhower, a fully developed man, a general [3] John Kennedy, fully developed if scary as hell [3] Gerald Ford, fully developed and might have been a great high school coach [4] Ronald Reagan, fully developed and one cool dude.

I do not consider Richard Nixon a fully developed man at the time of his presidency since he needed the presidency to complete the process. Likewise Jimmy Carter. Have I missed someone? Oh yes, George Bush, Sr., fully developed.

William Clinton, fully developed.

The "fully developed" men had personas which were ironclad before election.

Obviously I'm not comparing value. I'm comparing only the extent to which the individuals were fully developed before assuming, or even running for, the presidency.

Gore seems to be playing a role and is caught up in virtual reality. Bush, Jr. seems to want with all his heart to be fully developed, but isn't.

Who's out there in the wings? The Newt? Any offspring of Al Simpson?

By the outcome of this election, and specifically by the way it has become clearly deadlocked, I'm comforted by the apparent fact that the American voter is fully aware and is essentially saying: no mandate this time; we'll wait.

Too cool.

As an aside, I've been watching Dick Cheney in his few reluctant TV appearances and am moved by what I see as his latent desire to be somewhere else, to be doing something else.

It's all here

September 19, 2000

There is no such thing as Society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.
..... MARGARET THATCHER 1987

A man, Jim Skoog, wrote the following on a public bulletin board and I felt compelled to respond:

Most public hospitals in America have a policy whereby treatment is not based on a patient's ability to pay.

Given the millions of uninsured smokers who burden the system, smokers definitely do impact nonsmokers.

We citizens are not islands unto ourselves -- many of the so-called personal freedoms we defend as affecting no one but ourselves actually have very real public consequences.

Denial is a handy scapegoat. By thinking of bad choices as purely private matters, we need not consider our responsibilities to society.

I responded as follows:


Jim, you've pointed out the dynamics of the system and those who burden it.

It's true that some people still smoke. Far fewer people than before but still around a quarter of us.

Not long ago two thirds of this country's people smoked and worked and paid their taxes.

If it weren't for them we wouldn't have a system.

I have yet to hear anyone declare himself an island or apologize for smoking.

If you smoke and have paid your dues, the audacity of someone who says you burden the very system you created and funded seems striking indeed.

A choice of any kind is a purely private matter. To think otherwise is to abdicate citizenship in the United States of America.

Our responsibility to our society is to protect our sovereign individuality and the right we own to make bad choices.

I then posted a short response to a well written diatribe against those who attack the generic smoker, substantially as follows:

"With little or nothing remaining unsaid about the dangers of smoking - there isn't one child or adult in America who doesn't know that cigarette smoking can lead to cancer."

So does breathing most of the air available to most of us nowadays. L.A. finally got their supply under control and it's no longer a death sentence to live there. On the other hand, they are somewhat advanced.

Sure, they still smoke, but they no longer have to breath poison. The trick is to control emissions.

In Atlanta, where I live, emissions are now the major problem. Smoke from cigarettes or cigars is an afterthought, or should be.

They were there

October 21, 2000

To even the blind and deaf it should be summarily obvious that either Arafat has no control over his citizens or he sponsors their frenetic violence in the streets. That Arafat has little control should be no surprise since no Palestinian has ever acknowledged him as their supreme leader. He was chosen to be the up front mouth by factions within the Palestinian movement only because he prevailed as such early on. But just the up front mouth, and nothing more. No Palestinian will acknowldedge him as their incontestable leader for real.

They have no leader. And they have no point. Or do they?

The History of Palestine

The concept of a Palestinian state did not recur until the Six Day War of 1967 which was clearly an Israeli victory. Most "Palestinians" were then citizens of Jordan, some three quarters of a million of them having been run out of Palestine by the Jews years earlier. Palestinians, whoever they were or are, living in Jordan, as they were, were saying, "Screw this. Israel got their own country and we want one too. Screw Jordan and Israel!"

So who the hell are these "Palestinians"? For that matter, who the hell are "the Israelis"?

Both the Jews and the Palestinians shared some land a long time ago. There were no "nations" then on this land though the Palestinians of the Islamic persuasion consisted of 95% of the population. The religion of the few Jews who were there was generously tolerated.

The deal is, the Jews gained the sympathy of the entire world as a result of the Nazi attempt to exterminate the lot of them. This sympathy, empathy perhaps, translated eventually into: "OK, take this spot of land and call it yours. It's never been anything but untitled land before now and now the whole world wants it to be your land."

Cool. The Jews settled in, what was left of them, named this real estate "Israel", and the rest of the folks who used to live there a couple thousand years earlier, dispossessed as they were, got jealous as they slowly realized what had happened. Big time jealous.

This jealousy is festering now, yet again, and it is bloody. One thing the "Palestinians" should acknowledge is that no one has ever attempted to exterminate the lot of them. In this sense they are at the disadvantage of the Jews who maintain historical empathy. With this empathy the Jews successfully cut out and now maintain a lock on the geographical boundaries the victors of World War II penciled in for them.

What has really happened is that of the two peoples who once occupied this land only one has been given status. Only one has been gifted a country. The others have no status and nothing was penciled in for them. Because there was no Nazi attempt to obliterate the Arabs who also occupied this land but who also failed to leave it and permeate Europe as did the Jews there is no sympathy, no empathy, and no country.

Of course, that is the problem.

It is very unfortunate. And, needless to say, it is unfair.

A couple of generations after the war that carved that land some now say, "Wait a minute. No one ever asked me or my father or my grandfather. You carve out a nation for Jews and, what the hell, we are now excluded from the land that was once all ours? I don't think so. We are slow, but we will not be dispossessed."

"We will not be dispossessed!" These words, not necessarily spoken so clearly by the protagonists of the time, now compose the fuel behind the emotional "Palestinian" impatience with the birth, or rebirth, of their own country. They are pissed and they want a country now. They also do not want to be excluded in any way from the city things, the religious things, that they helped create but were slow in reclaiming.

Before this land was arbitrarily carved into geographical specifics by those who won the War, they were there. The Palastinians were there and they had been there for a few thousand years.

Sure, Jews were there too. They were all there, and they were all Palestinians.

Think about it.